For the 2014 midterm elections, the GOP has some truly scary candidates with extreme views on women's rights, the climate, and how our government should function. Some of them proudly tout their extreme beliefs while others hide behind them, but all of them would take us a step backward should they be elected.

What will it take to oust Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in the upcoming mid-term election? In short, female voter turnout. Because, you see, there's a gender divide on the two running candidates when it comes to the polling, and its significant.

The recent release of photos purportedly showing Jennifer Lawrence and a number of other celebrities naked is a serious breach of privacy that should upset anyone who believes in the ideal that everyone, even celebrities, have an inalienable right to privacy. This right is not something that is given away whenever an individual achieves stardom and it must be protected.

"They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed." And just like that, marriage equality is the law of the land.Today is a day millions of our citizens--both gay and straight--will never forget.

"After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No! You can't drive. We don't want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out." -- President Obama slamming Republicans on the campaign trail, May 2010.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by a vote of 14 to 1, committee chairman Senator Richard Burr argued that it successfully balanced security and privacy.

“We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.”This was just part of a collaborative response by French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo to then-French President Jacques Chirac back in 2006.

2014 was a great year for liberals. Marriage equality is sweeping across the nation, the federal courts now have a majority of liberal jurists, America's foreign policy is being reshaped in Obama's image, and both red and blue states voted to choose if they wanted to legalize a plant. Democrats may have lost the Senate, but their priorities surely won in 2014.

“Roe v. Wade,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in 1992, “stands as a sort of judicial Potemkin Village, which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent. But behind the facade, an entirely new method of analysis, without any roots in constitutional law, is imported to decide the constitutionality of state laws regulating abortion.” Rehnquist was dissenting in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the landmark case in which the court “reaffirmed” the “essential holding” of Roe. The word “reaffirm,” to a three-judge plurality, meant “completely rewrite.” Casey replaced Roe’s strict protection of choice as a “fundamental right” with a standard that no one can honestly claim to understand.

WHEN SHE WAS 20 YEARS OLD, Renee Chelian began every Friday with a predawn drive to an airplane hangar outside Detroit. There she met an abortion doctor, and a pilot who flew them to Buffalo, New York. This was 1971. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a woman's right to an abortion, was still a year and a half away, and New York was one of the few places in the country where abortion was legal. Chelian was the doctor's assistant. She cleaned instruments and made appointments for women who hitchhiked or drove from all over the Midwest and New England to reach the clinic.

Where do Americans stand on abortion? Well, they don’t so much “stand” as they do muddle in the middle. The latest Gallup poll says 50 percent of Americans call themselves “pro-choice”; 44 percent “pro-life”. (That’s a slight change toward the “pro-choice” position.) But probe a little deeper, and it depends on how you ask the question. A CBS poll last March found 38 percent saying it should be “generally available”, 34 percent favored “stricter limits”, and 25 percent said it should be not available at all. A recent Pew summary found Americans were “roughly divided” on the issue—51 percent saying it should permitted in “all or most cases, with 43 percent saying it should not be allowed in all or most cases.

In the United States, our most successful demagogues have often become so by making skillful use of whatever the newest media was at the time. Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest who railed against Jews and capitalism in the nineteen-thirties, did most of his railing via the radios that the American masses had just recently acquired. In the early fifties, Joseph McCarthy took advantage of television’s advent to attract gavel-to-gavel attention for his congressional hearings. Donald Trump is a celebrity demagogue, and, for the moment, anyway, the leading Republican Presidential candidate, because of reality television and Twitter.

For Democrats, the most important thing that happened at Thursday's Republican presidential debate had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It was the way the candidates raced to stake out tough positions on abortion that could hurt the GOP in the 2016 general election. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said there's no case in which an abortion is medically necessary, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said he does not support rape and incest exceptions to laws restricting abortion, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said a simple change in the law could make an outright abortion ban constitutional.

Republicans are back at their five-year fight, preparing this week to vote to yank tens of millions of federal dollars from enemy No. 1 – Planned Parenthood. But the abortion-defunding fight wasn’t always waged this way. In fact, Republicans used to have a more ambitious line of attack, one that aimed to take on all providers of the procedure. But since 2011, they’ve shifted strategy. Instead of focusing on a hazy notion of abortion providers, they created a clear enemy in Planned Parenthood.

Pro-life activists have long touted “post-abortion syndrome”—the notion that women experience major emotional trauma after terminating a pregnancy—as a reason for regulating the procedure. But a new study has found that 99 percent of those who had been through the process believed they had made the right decision, casting significant doubt on a medical theory that has enabled the passing of a ban on late abortions, mandatory ultrasound viewing, and waiting period legislation.

“Mitt Romney is pro-life. He’ll govern as a pro-life president, but you’re going to see the Democrats use all sorts of shiny objects to distract people’s attention from the Obama performance on the economy. This is not a social issue election.”

A former aide to Representative Frank Farenthold has sued the congressman and his office staff for creating a hostile work environment and gender discrimination. The former aide accused the congressman of making sexual comments about her and claimed he is regularly drunk on the job, which caused him to say a plethora of inappropriate things. She is seeking an unspecified amount of money for lost pay and emotional distress.

After silencing State Senator Wendy Davis for breaking strict filibuster rules, Texas Republicans claimed they passed their restrictive abortion bill before its midnight deadline. The only problem is that the official clock in the gallery showed that it was clearly passed midnight. After a few hours of confusion, it was eventually ruled that the vote was taken past midnight and was invalidated.